For any DGR's coming to play the Amateur National Championships in Michigan in June, I am offering a guided tour of the Toboggan course.

The Toboggan is a course which is deserving of a few practice rounds before the competition begins. I help run the event and will likely be playing it every day it is in (its a temporary course, just installed for the event) beforehand.

The tournament starts on Friday. On Thursday prior there is a doubles event during the day and that evening the mandatory Player's Meeting and banquet. So the logical time for the practice round/guided tour would be Wednesday.

Jeronimo wrote:What's the reasoning in it being a temporary course? It's an almost infamous course in disc golf and those of us who can't get out there for AM NATs will never see it.

Haha, because we don't own the course or the park.

Jim Kenner (owner of Discraft) spent years lobbying Kensington Metropark to put in a disc golf course. When the talks got serious he proposed the Toboggan area for the course to be located. The park declined so the original course was installed some dozen years ago in the area we were given.

The idea for the Toboggan did not die though, and we were allowed to install it for the first time, on a temporary basis for the 2000 PDGA Pro-Am World Championships. A couple years later the PDGA granted the Amateur National Championships to Michigan and the park has been kind enough to let us use the Toboggan area for the tournament.

The course sits on 60-some acres, which the park mows solely so we can use it for this event. It is considered the prime land in a huge park where disc golf is a small draw compared to the other park areas and annual events. We are truly grateful for the opportunity to use it for a couple weeks a year. Although I love the course and play it most days it is in each year, when it gets pulled I am happy to play a course where I no longer need to be part mountain goat to navigate it. Walking those hills takes a toll.

Few parks give their prime areas for disc golf courses. We are often relegated to flood plains or other less desirable areas. We take what we can get. We should be grateful that parks continue to allow us to exist given the erosion, destruction, vandalism, littering, and drunken foolishness which we see too often from players.

Mark Ellis wrote:Few parks give their prime areas for disc golf courses. We are often relegated to flood plains or other less desirable areas. We take what we can get. We should be grateful that parks continue to allow us to exist given the erosion, destruction, vandalism, littering, and drunken foolishness which we see too often from players.